From the WSJ Opinion Archives
Smearing
Barbara Cubin
"Where's the Outrage?" thunders the headline of a Washington Post
editorial. It seems the fellows at the Post have found themselves a new Trent
Lott, in the person of Rep. Barbara Cubin, a Wyoming Republican whom the paper
accuses of "bald racism." The paper blasts Cubin for a remark she
made during a debate on a gun bill:
For fear that some may think they are taken out of context, we reprint the offending part here in its entirety: "My sons are 25 and 30. They are blond-haired and blue-eyed. One amendment today said we could not sell guns to anybody under drug treatment. So does that mean if you go into a black community, you cannot sell a gun to any black person, or does that mean because my--"
At this point, Rep. Melvin Watt (D-N.C.) demanded that her words be stricken from the record as inappropriate. You might think that Mrs. Cubin then would have realized she had equated African Americans with drug addicts and apologized as profusely as possible. Instead, she told Mr. Watt, who is African American, that she wanted "to apologize to my colleague for his sensitivities." . . .
Mrs. Cubin said later that she was simply trying "to make the point that stereotyping is always wrong." If so, she chose an odd way to do so. The reference to her sons, she explained, was headed in the direction of asking if they should be kept from buying guns because they look like "the children at Columbine." But to argue analogously that the amendment would have kept dealers from selling guns in the black community is true only if you subscribe to a worldview in which "African American" equals "presumptive drug user."
Now, the meaning of Cubin's remark is somewhat unclear, partly because, as Slate's Timothy Noah points out, she was interrupted in midsentence. It seems unsporting to beat up on the woman over a thought that her colleague didn't even have the courtesy to let her finish. (The full exchange, in PDF format, is in the Congressional Record.)
But the Post's interpretation--that Cubin equates blacks with "presumptive drug users"--is implausible. No one, racist or not, could possibly think that a law barring gun sales to people in drug treatment would mean, in the words of Cubin's rhetorical question, that "if you go into a black community, you cannot sell a gun to any black person." Besides, Cubin was arguing against this amendment. If she were a racist and she thought the amendment would keep the guns out of the hands of blacks, wouldn't she endorse it?
Cubin was presumably speaking extemporaneously, and her words were imprecise. But it seems obvious that she meant to suggest the amendment banning gun sales to drug-treatment patients would be invidiously discriminatory, similar in principle to a hypothetical ban on gun sales to blacks, or to people who "look like the children at Columbine."
This may be a faulty analogy, or an offensive one. But America's entire body of antidiscrimination law, except as it applies specifically to racial discrimination, is built upon precisely such analogies. The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, was one of three post-Civil War amendments designed to extend full citizenship to black Americans. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, Congress's most serious and effective measure aimed at enforcing the 14th Amendment's equal-protection guarantee, outlaws discrimination on the basis not only of race and color but also of three nonracial categories: religion, sex and national origin.
Since then, Congress, state and local legislatures, and the courts have passed laws and issued rulings expanding the categories on which discrimination is barred to include such things as age, veteran status and (in some places) sexual orientation. One such law is the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990. Among other things, the ADA defines drug addiction--though not drug use--as a disability. Thus Americans who are in drug treatment have civil-rights protections under the law, just as blacks do.
The Washington Post editorialists described the first President Bush's signing of the ADA as "a joyous occasion." It's more than a little hypocritical for them to wave the bloody shirt of racism as they slander a congresswoman for supporting the rights of the disabled.
Getting
the Message
Another pro-Saddam trope is going the way of the erstwhile Iraqi dictator's
statues. Remember how opponents of liberating Iraq said we should deal with
North Korea instead, because it was a bigger threat? "The United States'
destruction of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime may have induced North
Korea's leader Kim Jong-Il to hasten to the negotiating table to resolve the
Stalinist country's nuclear crisis," Agence France-Presse reports.
America had rejected Pyongyang's demands for one-on-one U.S.-NoKo talks, arguing that other regional actors--China, Japan, Russia and South Korea--should also be involved. Those four countries, eager to shirk their responsibilities, said they wanted the U.S. to act unilaterally. Now Seoul is changing its tune too. "South Korea gave the United States a 'road map' of ideas on Monday to help resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis," Reuters reports.
What accounts for Kim Jong Il's change of heart? Well, there are a lot of statues of him and his father in Pyongyang, and it'd be a shame if anything were to happen to them . . .
Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports from Tehran that Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran's hard-line ex-president, "expressed support Saturday for holding a referendum on restoring ties with the United States, marking a significant shift as his fellow hard-liners nervously watch U.S.-led forces take control of neighboring Iraq." The liberation of Iraq would seem to be as great a didactic success as a military one.
Not
Getting the Message
On the other hand, some people are impervious to reality, perhaps because the
reality of the rest of the world doesn't really affect them. "It's demoralizing,
there's no question about that," the Boston Globe quotes one Jennifer Horan
as saying in response to America's victory. Plainly the plight of the long-suffering
Iraqi people is of no moment to Horan and her ilk; they just can't stand to
see America win.
Indeed, many "antiwar" Westerners seem to view world politics as if it were a sporting event. They hate America and George W. Bush the way some folks hate the New York Yankees and George Steinbrenner. In an unusually honest piece, Salon's Gary Kamiya acknowledges that "many antiwar commentators" feared that "an easy victory will ultimately result in a larger moral negative--four more years of Bush, for example."
Thus far every single prediction of the antliberation folks has proved spectacularly wrong. The war was not a distraction against al Qaeda, it hasn't led to new terrorist attacks, there haven't been massive civilian casualties, Iraqis have welcomed coalition troops as liberators, the battle against the "elite Republican Guard" proved to be more or less a cakewalk, the "Arab street" has been more stunned than furious, Israel hasn't expelled any Palestinian Arabs--the list could go on.
You'd think that having been so wrong, these guys would at least lie low for a while and try to figure out what happened. But Kamiya is the exception. Most antiwarriors are busy cooking up new complaints. One is the rioting that broke out after the liberation. Now, rioting isn't exactly unheard of in America; when Los Angeles residents rioted in 1992, good liberals insisted on the need to "understand" their "rage." But there's no such compassion for people who have actually been oppressed for decades. Saturday's New York Times published a hysterical editorial whose headline warns of "Anarchy in the Streets." The editorial complains that "the bureaucratic and law enforcement services in Iraqi cities have melted away." Yeah, the good news is Germany has been liberated from the Nazis. The bad news is the Gestapo is no longer around to provide law and order.
In truth, the rioting is already subsiding, as was entirely predictable; riots always burn hot and fast. Even the Arab News paints a much more encouraging picture of life in Baghdad:
The Palestine Hotel has become a version of Speakers Corner in London's Hyde Park, with large numbers of Iraqis chanting and expressing diverse opinions about the war, Saddam Hussein and the US presence in the Iraqi capital.
One Iraqi shouted at US troops to "go home." He later told Arab News that their situation had gone from bad to worse because of the war, and blamed this solely on US troops.
But many Iraqis are happy to have US troops, a group of them chanting "Bush don't go."
"We don't want Chalabi," they screamed, expressing their distrust of the possible US-backed future Iraqi leader.
A month ago, Iraq was one of the most repressive totalitarian societies in the world. Now its citizens gather on the streets and openly debate the future of their country. How can this be anything other than a cause for celebration?
As for the looting, much of it has been directed against the regime or its supporters, as the Times' John Burns noted in a Friday report:
The looters appeared, mainly, to concentrate on sites associated with Mr. Hussein, sparing most private homes and businesses. . . .
At the French cultural center, where looters burst water pipes and flooded the ground floor, books were left floating in the reading rooms and corridors, and a photograph of Jacques Chirac, the French president, was smashed.
Anti-American polemicist Robert "25 Rolls" Fisk laments the sacking of Iraq's National Archaeological Museum, from which many priceless antiquities were stolen or destroyed. Fisk opines that the museum was "trashed by the looters whom the Americans unleashed on the city during their 'liberation.' " What happened at the museum does indeed sound lamentable, but this Fisk comment is one of the ugliest expressions of elitism we've ever heard. America is at fault for "unleashing" the Iraqi people--as if they were no more than dogs, and Saddam a benign animal lover.
Agence France-Presse, meanwhile, has a more encouraging story:
"Iraqi Muslims came to the aid of Baghdad's tiny Jewish community yesterday, chasing out looters trying to sack its cultural centre in the heart of the capital.
"At 3 am, I saw two men, one with a beard, on the roof of the Jewish community house and I cried out to my friend, 'Hossam, bring the Kalashnikovs!' " said Hassam Kassam, 21.
Neither Hassan nor Hossam, who is the guard at the centre, was armed at the time but the threat worked in scaring off the intruders.
Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa--who in October voted in favor of declaring war--offers another silly retrospective argument--that, as the Des Moines Register puts it, "the relatively quick fall of Baghdad shows that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was a 'paper tiger' rather than a major threat to world peace":
"It looks now like this was just a Third World country--there were people fighting with tennis shoes on, on the Iraqi side," Harkin told reporters. "I don't know what else we're going to find, but they didn't fly even one airplane in the air. They had almost nothing.
"So if they were that weak, where we could just roll over them like that, tell me again how he was such a big threat in the past?" the senator added.
Well, Tom, you might ask that question to the Iranians, Kurds, Kuwaitis and Shiites. Anyway, isn't it possible that the quick success had something to do with the excellence of America's military?
In the Independent, Andrew Gumbel offers another complaint: As far as we know, coalition forces haven't yet found any Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. "Many influential people . . . have begun to wonder aloud if the weapons exist at all."
This is just goofy. Saddam is known to have had such weapons in the 1990s, and U.N. resolutions obliged him to destroy them and account for their destruction. He never offered any such accounting. So in order to doubt that Iraq lacks weapons of mass destruction, you have to believe that Saddam destroyed them and then didn't bother to tell anyone about it.
Gumbel's impatience for weapons of mass destruction is downright infantile. He pounds the table and demands to know why the coalition hasn't found them and announced it publicly in three weeks--during which time the coalition has been busy waging a military campaign. Weren't we hearing just a few weeks back that the U.N. inspectors needed many more months to find these weapons? Besides, we haven't found Saddam Hussein or his sons either. Does that mean they never existed?
Finally, for the sake of argument, let's accept the implausible assumption that weapons of mass destruction never turn up. In such a case, the worst that can be said about the coalition is that it did the right thing for the wrong reason. Or does Andrew Gumbel want to take up the cause of restoring Iraq's Baathist dictatorship to power?
CNN
Declares Independence
Friday's Washington Post has an article on the coalition replacement for Iraqi
state television, which includes this whopper:
CNN declined to have its newscasts included. "As an independent, global news organization, we did not think it was appropriate to participate in a U.S. government transmission," spokeswoman Christa Robinson said.
This appeared on the same day as CNN exec Eason Jordan's New York Times op-ed piece in which he acknowledged suppressing news, supposedly in order to avoid endangering Iraqis cooperating with CNN. But as Franklin Foer notes in today's Wall Street Journal, Jordan previously denied having engaged in such suppression. And here's a fascinating item from a May 1999 issue of the Atlanta Business Chronicle (third item, emphasis ours):
Forget Serbia, forget Iraq.
"The government we have the toughest time with is the U.S. government," said Eason Jordan, CNN's president for global newsgathering, at the network's annual World Report Conference May 4.
Because of trade embargoes, the U.S. government is involved in where CNN opens its bureaus, Jordan said. CNN has been trying for a year to open a permanent bureau in Baghdad, Iraq, and now has permission from the Iraqis, he said. "I've [recently] been thrown out of the White House pleading this case."
Weasel
Watch
"Some of Iraq's top weapons scientists already have fled their country
and are in Syria, from where they may seek political safety in France,"
the Washington Times reports, citing "administration sources."
Meanwhile, France's Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin was in Damascus over the weekend, meeting with the Syrian FM, Farouk al-Sharaa. CNN reports on a hilarious exchange between the two:
Talking about the Bush administration's military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, Sharaa questioned the United States' motive.
"Look at all these things: Is Afghanistan stable? Have their objectives been achieved? Have they found Osama bin Laden?" he asked, before mentioning the "looting and lawlessness" that followed the fall of Saddam's regime.
"They've left a mess in both these countries and they're not finished. Now turning their attention to a third country," he said. "Historians talk about the Second World War and how the Germans should have been stopped earlier."
Then, just before Sharaa was about to compare the Bush administration to Nazi Germany, France's de Villepin stopped him.
"You do not want to make this comparison," de Villepin said. "Don't do this."
In a similar vein, Pravda takes exception to Donald Rumsfeld's statement that Saddam Hussein has joined Hitler, Lenin, Stalin and Ceausescu in the ranks of failed dictators:
For Donald Rumsfeld's information, Vladimir Ulyanov [Lenin] came to power on a message of "bread and peace," setting in motion a process which was to bring a Medieval state to the front line of development and give to an oppressed, illiterate population with a near to zero chance of social mobility every opportunity for a good education, a guaranteed job, house, retirement pension, food, vodka, health care and cultural and sports opportunities second to none.
Vladimir Ulyanov set in motion a process which sees the Russian people today as well or better prepared than their peers abroad to perform any job anywhere on earth.
That's telling him! Meanwhile, London's Sunday Telegraph reports it has received "top secret documents" that "show that Russia provided Saddam Hussein's regime with wide-ranging assistance in the months leading up to the war, including intelligence on private conversations between Tony Blair and other Western leaders":
Moscow also provided Saddam with lists of assassins available for "hits" in the West and details of arms deals to neighbouring countries. The two countries also signed agreements to share intelligence, help each other to "obtain" visas for agents to go to other countries and to exchange information on the activities of Osama bin Laden, the al-Qa'eda leader.
Meanwhile, Russia's President Vladimir Putin seems to be trying out for the apparently vacant job of Iraqi "information minister." The Associated Press reports that Putin "said April 11, 2003 there were no prospects for a military solution to the crisis in Iraq." CNN reports he "has accused the U.S.-led coalition of having failed to achieve its war aim, to disarm Iraq." And Reuters has this delicious Putin quote: "We have no intention of dealing in the export of capitalist democratic revolution." How about its import?
Regime
Change in Reuterville?
"Reuters has launched the search for a new chairman to succeed Sir Christopher
Hogg, who has spent 18 years at the helm of the electronic information group,"
the Financial Times reports. We wonder if that has anything to do with these
extraordinary passages from a Reuters
dispatch about "antiwar" protests:
Organizers appealed to the crowd to provide records of the incidents of what they called "police brutality." . . .
In San Francisco, more than 1,000 demonstrators huddled peacefully under umbrellas in a steady rain in front of City Hall to protest a U.S. "occupation" of Iraq, then marched to a nearby park for another anti-war rally.
Oddly enough, the scare quotes around police brutality and occupation are actually appropriate.
Yogi
Berra Goes to War
"The White House has conceded that the mobile weapons labs may be hard
to find because of their mobility."--FoxNews.com, April 11
Life Imitates 'South Park'
"Meet Saddam Hussein, my new partner in evil."--"Satan," "South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut," 1999
"A retired banker living in Switzerland spent 10 years helping Iraqi President Saddam Hussein hide millions of dollars via a bank account under the name of Satan, Britain's Sunday Times reported."--the Age (Melbourne, Australia), April 14, 2003
Cuckoo
Clucks Columnist
"Now we can turn our attention from the gulf war to the golf war, as Martha
Burk faces off against the Ku Klux Klan at the Masters in Augusta," writes
the New York Times' Maureen Dowd, who sided with David Duke in opposing the
liberation of Iraq.
Not
Too Brite--LXVI
"A Cambodian who set out to catch fish with car batteries and electrodes
got a taste of his own medicine when he stepped on an electric rat-trap and
died," Reuters reports from Phnom Penh.
Oddly Enough!
Onion Without Appeal
Has anyone else noticed that the Onion has become awfully unfunny of late? A
case in point is a story in last week's issue entitled "137 More Oil Wells
Liberated for Democracy":
The U.S. continued to make progress in its fight against totalitarianism Tuesday, when 137 more oil wells were liberated for democracy.
"For decades, these oil wells have suffered untold misery under Saddam Hussein's tyrannical rule," said U.S. Commander General Tommy Franks, speaking from southern Iraq's Rumailah oil fields, the site of the liberation. "With this victory, these long-oppressed wells will soon pump their first barrels of crude as free and equal wells in the global petroleum marketplace. They will join the ranks of the world's liberated oil wells, enjoying the same rights as their democratic brethren around the globe."
Ha ha! You get it? The war is about oil! After all, if we really cared about democracy, we'd just have let Saddam destroy his country's resources! Ain't it a scream? Ain't it subtle?
Or how about this "mock" headline, from the front page of this week's issue: "Saddam Misinterprets Anti-War Protest As Pro-Saddam." What exactly is the joke here? Saddam actually did interpret "antiwar" protests as pro-Saddam. Either he was wrong, in which case the Onion headline describes exactly what happened, or he was right and the protests were pro-Saddam. The truth is probably a bit of each, but in any case the Onion's attempt at humor is embarrassingly lame.
Now, here's a headline worthy of the Onion of old: "Anti-War Groups Worry About Losing Momentum After War." Only that's not from the Onion. It's not even from Scrappleface.com, Scott Ott's excellent satirical blog. No, it's from the Associated Press.
Actually, the AP story isn't an isolated incident. Just at the moment when the Onion has given up on being funny, the actual news is filled with Onion-like stories. Here's one from Bahrain's Gulf Daily News:
Steps were taken by a distributor for Apple Computers to ensure that Israeli-made parts do not enter Bahrain after an Israeli-made battery was discovered by a customer in an old Apple Computer model.
Apple Centre manager Asif Mohammed Irfan said the battery powers the calendar and clock of an old Apple G4 model but added that he didn't believe that it was sold in large numbers. . . .
He said that Arab Business Machines had sent them replacement batteries, which have already arrived.
"Anyone who finds that their computer is powered by such a battery can come to us and we will change it for them free of charge," said Mr Irfan. . . .
". . .This raises interesting questions about how widespread it may be. We could have Israeli parts in our mobile phones, cameras and even our vehicles and not even know it."
CNSNews.com--in a story not labeled satire--quotes one Stephanie Schaudel, "co-coordinator for Voices in the Wilderness," who says she's discovered a new threat to Iraqi civilians: fast food. "Some people would think that seeing a KFC (formerly Kentucky Fried Chicken) on a street corner is a sign of progress, I certainly don't," Schaudel says.
And the Associated Press reports on the Army's visit to what they dubbed "Saddam's love shack":
The doors of the town house opened to reveal a playboy's fantasy straight from the 1960s: mirrored bedroom, lamps shaped like women, airbrushed paintings of a topless blonde woman and a mustached hero battling a crocodile. . . .
The home's 1960s look--parodied in the series of "Austin Powers" spy spoofs--inspired a round of imitations from soldiers slogging door to door.
"Yeah, baaabeee," said [Capt. Chris] Carter, doing his best imitation of actor Mike Myers' character.
"Shagadelic," another soldier shouted.
Indeed, the carpet was navy blue shag.
So here's a tip for the Onion's editors: If you want to regain your former glory, try imitating life. These days, it's a lot funnier than you guys are.
(Elizabeth Crowley helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Robert LeChevalier, William Schultz, Natalie Cohen, Raghu Desikan, T. Norton, Bill Pleshek, Barak Moore, Michael Segal, Charlie Gaylord, Steven Platzer, Jose Guardia, Joseph Slominsky, Rosanne Klass, C.E. Dobkin, Joel Goldberg, Steve Staley, S.E. Brenner, Monty Krieger, Alan Perlman, Robert Graboyes, David Schlosser, Kevin Brotz, Tom George, Brad Lam, Terry Young, John O'Donnell, Herman Jacobs, Napoleon Cole, Andrew Blasko, Nick Eckert, Paul Music, Jerome Marcus, Scott Wood, Phil Newman, Shelley Taylor, Andrew Barnett, Dan Nitschke, Damian Bennett, Jonathan Rotherberg, Carl Sherer, Mara Gold, Jennifer Ray, Howard Weiser, Gordon Crovitz, Judie Amsel, Nancy Zimmerman, Mark Schulze, Bill Long, Dan Owens, Andrew Casterline, Brian Cronin, Steven Mason, Chris Sexton, Brendan Schulman, Joe Littrell, Dave Anderson, Dan Lewis, Brendan Cullen, Joseph Ebersole, Wayne Rutman, Chana Lajcher, Rosslyn Smith, Tony Booth, Drew Cooper, Daniel Foty, Asla Aydintasbas and Joshua Weiner. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)
Today on OpinionJournal:
- Review & Outlook: Now start looking for al Qaeda members in Iraq.
- Robert Bartley: Success in Iraq proves Bush is smarter than his critics.
- Franklin Foer: Having collaborated with Saddam, can CNN be trusted again?
- Julia Gorin: How the left can "support the troops" but oppose their mission.
